Life, Love and Brian Wilson

Remembering the guiding force of the Beach Boys

There have been many tributes in writing in the past week to Brian Wilson, almost all moving and all pointing to the deeply personal connection forged between him and the Beach Boys, and their fans. The Beach Boys were the third musical artist whose music spoke to me on a level far beyond the ordinary (the first being Elvis Presley and the second, the Beatles) and so, like for so many, the news of Wilson’s passing is both sad and yet another opportunity to listen with awe at the often transcendent power of the music he and his bandmates created.

The below essay tries to be both a personal one and one that pieces together the amazing rise of Wilson as a musician, songwriter and producer from 1961 to 1967. It’s my shot at trying to put into words why he matters so much and I hope I have succeeded while also recognizing the inherent inadequacy of words to make that argument. It may be a cliché to say, but it’s the music that really counts here. It remains rich beyond words.

---

Thirteen years ago on June 19, I had one of the best nights of my life. It was hot and humid as Toronto in June can be. Walking from the Exhibition stop at the end of the 509 streetcar line to the Molson Amphitheatre (now the Budweiser Stage), the sun was cooking the concrete and me as well. I kept thinking about these lyrics: “I get bugged driving up and down the same old strip,” and then began to clap in time for what followed: “I got to find a new place where the kids are hip.” It was a sign of the anticipation of the Beach Boys being in town as part of their 50th anniversary tour, marking a détente that was far more short-lived than it should have been and featuring the five primary surviving members of the group. Show time was but an hour or so away.

The following day, Brian Wilson turned 70. Nine days before he was to turn 83, he died. Even in these days where loss seems commonplace and the soul is weary, the news hit like a sucker punch in the gut. If Frank Sinatra brought vulnerability to pop music, Wilson and, by extension, the Beach Boys perfected it for rock and roll music. Wilson felt deeply. It wasn’t just something that appeared by the time of Pet Sounds. It was there from almost the start when Brian along with brothers Dennis and Carl, cousin Mike Love and pal Al Jardine recorded ‘Surfin’’ at World Pacific Studios in Los Angeles in October 1961. That recording is rudimentary, everyone sounding so young (they were—only Love was in his twenties and barely at that) and tentative. That would quickly change.

Of all the many remarkable things about the Beach Boys, what perhaps stands out above all is the trajectory their music took during the group’s first six years. The impulse to lock into a formula and wring it until it was left dry barely factored into the records they made. If anything, the formula was to evolve, to move, to reach further and deeper always. That was driven by Brian Wilson and the pressure to do so was borne disproportionately by him, cresting for the first time at the end of 1964. It was one of many times that Wilson’s need to articulate what only he could hear extracted a personal cost.

There’s a tendency to treat the early Beach Boys songs dedicated to the surf and to the automobile as a footnote to the revolutionary sounds that followed. This is understandable. Nothing more illustrates the group's essential dichotomy that Love focused on giving people what they wanted and Wilson focused on giving people what they needed. Narrow in on it too much, however, and miss the big picture of why the Beach Boys matter so much.

Like it or not, Love made very real contributions to the group, serving as the foil to Wilson that is a critical component of many of the greatest groups. And even as his stage banter could be embarrassing and cringeworthy among many other real and unfortunate sins, the barbs lodged at Love especially in the wake of Wilson’s death are antithetical to the love and mercy that became Wilson’s mantra.

Listen deeply to those early songs and find the hints of Brian Wilson's budding genius. ‘Shut Down’ tells of a drag race. The lyrics are full of car lingo: “revving up our engines,” “the four-thirteen’s really digging in” and “hear the dual quad’s drink.” But pay attention to the backing vocals. They aren’t simply offering a wordless bed of harmony. Instead, they layer the advancement of the action from “rev it up now” to “moving out now” to “pump it up now,” an upswing of the thrill of competition. That’s not what you would expect at all from a mere car song.

How about ‘Catch a Wave’? That’s maybe the first song that hinted that what the Beach Boys were aiming at was the universal and not the specific. To catch a wave while surfing is to paddle into one as it begins to grow and create a slope. That's the sign it's time to lift oneself upright onto one’s board and ride along it as the wave breaks. To catch a wave in the song is both literal—it’s clearly about surfing—and figurative. By the end, the chorus has morphed to the exuberant. To “catch a wave” so “you’ll be sitting on top of the world” means whatever you want it to be.

‘Our Car Club’ is about exclusivity and fraternity. ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ is about unity. ‘Don’t Back Down’ is about grit and resistance, of wiping out and then getting right back on your board. ‘Be True to Your School’ is about taking pride in where one comes from. There were two versions of that song recorded: one for Little Deuce Coupe and the other for a single release. The former is guitar-driven rock. The latter overflows with ecstasy. There are horns, flutes, marching drums and the Honeys, comprised of Marilyn Wilson, Brian’s then-wife, sister Diane Rovell and cousin Ginger Blake, singing like cheerleaders. It’s the first Brian Wilson production that was cinematic and immersive. It puts the listener in the middle of a high-school football game in all its heroic glory. It felt like pure joy and marked the start of Wilson’s reign as the master of the studio.

He took the principles of Phil Spector: soundscapes large in scope both in the number of musicians and instruments used, the backbeat stripped down to the snare, tom and bass drums with cymbals only used as an accent to the beat and employing the select group of California players that would one day be christened the Wrecking Crew, and made them all his own.

---

Thank you for reading Listening Sessions.

Both free and paid subscriptions are available. The best way to support my work of spreading the joy of listening to music is to consider taking out a paid subscription of $6/month or $50/annually (Canadian funds).

---

‘Don’t Worry Baby’ took the immortal drum opening of the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’—Wilson’s favourite record—and built an entirely new symphony of yearning from it. ‘I Get Around’ opened with a chorale, had a verse with a fractured rhythm and made the lyrics secondary to the refrain. ‘All Summer Long’ was rooted on the xylophone. ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ was an assured pop ballad with a luminous harp line that Wilson and Love wrote during the evening of the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

They form part of the canon of the early Beach Boys and in Toronto in 2012, the first part of the concert was centred around these recordings that collectively paint California as the land of dreams where the good life was for the taking. All you needed was to grab your surfboard and your best girl, turn the ignition of a smooth, shiny convertible and cruise down to the beach on the sunniest day of the summer. It may not have been realistic or even one that Wilson knew in any real way—only Dennis really lived the life that the Beach Boys sang so much about—but it was a way of living that soon became a song in itself, asking, “wouldn’t it be nice” if it were so.

The bridge of that song, the musical rocket that launched Pet Sounds, elaborates on this wish: “maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true / maybe then there wouldn’t be a single thing we couldn’t do / we could be married / and then we’d be happy.” These words, written by Tony Asher, were set against a repeat of the song’s opening line, played majestically by Barney Kessel on a 12-string mando-guitar, accented by Hal Blaine’s drums, Carol Kaye’s bass and Frank Capp’s glockenspiel. It lifts on the wings of longing by the song’s young couple that they may one day not have to part at the end of the night.

The fact of the matter is that if all Wilson had ever written was this small section of music that would have been enough to count him among the immortals. But, that kind of transcendence doesn’t just come out of the blue. It is honed through doing the work. In Wilson’s case, part of it was the important leap forward of The Beach Boys Today!, released in March 1965. It wasn’t just that the instrumentation got more sophisticated as on ‘Dance, Dance, Dance,’ another ode to American teenagerdom, with its sudden key change in the middle of the third verse, the rush of the studio musicians merging with the urgency of Love’s lead vocal and the charge of the most exuberant “yeah!” caught on record since the Beatles’ ‘She Loves You.’ It was more that the lyrics Wilson and Love were writing and the themes they were exploring were now meeting their match in the music that Wilson was writing and the arrangements he was realizing.

‘When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)’ took the introspection of ‘In My Room’ and upped the ante. The album’s second side went even further, forming a suite of love songs of melancholic intensity that explored the acuteness of emotion that is the hallmark of young love. The last of them, ‘In the Back of My Mind,’ with Dennis singing lead, is the most prescient of them all. The arrangement is string-based, the harmonic motion ambiguous and the melody almost classical in its avoidance of the cadence and resolutions of conventional pop songwriting.

The LP that followed, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!), brought this urge to be different to almost everything on the album. Frippery like ‘Amusement Parks U.S.A.’ and ‘Salt Lake City’ were mediated by backing tracks of intricate ambition. But it was a quartet of songs—two from the album and the remaining two to be released as singles in the following months—that anointed Wilson as steering not only the Beach Boys into miraculous territory but also the broader pop and rock scene.

‘California Girls’ is, in retrospect, the apex as well as the informal valedictory to the first chapter of the Beach Boys. The music came to Wilson in the aftermath of his first LSD trip. The rubato opening—an elaboration of the stop-and-start of ‘Wendy’—is a signifier that what will follow will be momentous. The down beats of the chorus throb and rattle. The harmonies are denser than ever, filling the space with elation especially when Wilson’s voice rides on top of “I wish they could be…” The song’s subject mater is eclipsed by the music becoming pure celebration.

Its flipside, in every way including as a single, was ‘Let Him Run Wild.’ The sound: the music and the vocals, was equally transcendent. Each verse, telling the story of a guy who pines for a woman stuck in a relationship with a creep, begins with an appraisal of sadness moving upward to the possibility of a happy resolution. The chorus shudders with agony, the bridge to the next verse switches to rhapsody.

Following ‘California Girls’ was ‘The Little Girl I Once Knew.’ Wilson stretched ever further with the famous pause between verse and chorus, a swirling organ part played by Don Randi, the threatrics of Love’s punctuations (“look out, babe” and “split, man”) and the harmonies pouring out in every direction.

And then there was a backing track recorded in the summer of 1965 that had vocals added at the end of the year. It was released as a single in March 1966. The transformation of the folk song ‘The Wreck of the John B.’ into ‘Sloop John B.’ is so thorough, it’s easy to see it, with its desperate pining for home, as a Brian Wilson song. It functioned as a kind of entr’acte to Pet Sounds, closing out the first side, cleansing the palette before the record is flipped over for ‘God Only Knows.’

Among other things, Pet Sounds secured timelessness for Wilson and the Beach Boys, its influence now so vast, its appeal intergenerational that, at some point, it removed the stigma that used to be attached to being a fan of the group.

The second set of the 50th anniversary shows used the album as its focal point, featuring all the expectant hits but also its emotional centrepiece, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.’

Ted Gioia’s essay on Wilson’s passing, ‘Brian Wilson Is My Brick,’ reflects on how it remains a lifeline to those who feel different and whose peers are happy to do whatever they can to make one pay—psychologically as well as physically—for being so. In part, he writes of those who find music more rewarding and important than the average person, that “we’re drawn to [it] as a kind of healing meditation—as a way to finding wholeness in our soul.”

I first heard Pet Sounds when I was 11 or 12. It took a while to find an entry point to some of its paeans to the onset of adulthood, but I got ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ right away. Its lament that “they say I got brains / but they ain’t doing me no good” and that “each time things start to happen again / I think I got something good going for myself / but what goes wrong’ was as if it was excavated from my unwritten thoughts.

They expressed the pain, the sudden realization when I was very, very young that I was on a different wavelength than most—evangelizing about Elvis Presley to my fellow kindergartners in 1982 provided instant enrollment in the school of hard knocks. They provided consolation that I was not alone. Fast-forward to 2012 and hearing Wilson sing it as night began to fall along the shore of Lake Ontario, being different having long been in the process of being transformed into a badge of honour, was like a gift from the gods. As the concluding canon began with Wilson and Jardine’s voices weaving around each other, tears began to roll down my cheeks.

By 2012, Wilson was in the midst of a hard-fought and hard-won peace after years of darkness, a period which began with the shelving of what was to be the momentous follow-up to Pet Sounds, SMiLE. His embrace of modular recording—breaking compositions down into sections that could be stitched together to create the finished recording—began with ‘Good Vibrations,’ taking over six months to complete. Session after session was spent trying out different combinations of instruments playing variations of the verse and chorus.

‘Heroes and Villains’ took even longer to record and there were even more possibilities on how to realize its kaleidoscopic telling of the settling of the American West. Indeed, that’s ultimately why I think Wilson stopped SMiLE. When the creative box is opened as wide as it was for Wilson in the winter of 1967, there is no such thing as closing it shut. That the job could never be quite done helped fuel the countless fan-led attempts at a finished SMiLE. Wilson did finish it and recorded his version of SMiLE in 2004. Seven years later came The SMiLE Sessions, including an as-close-as-possible approximation at what a Beach Boys SMiLE could have been.

The sudden end of SMiLE also ended Wilson and the Beach Boys’ rise. What followed was music that remained deeply interesting and musically valid but was, at least initially, no longer music that was always going in the direction of growing intricacy. Smiley Smile, Wild Honey and Friends form a trilogy of low-fi weirdness that, although never intending to do so, heralded the indie-pop age.

Sunflower, released in 1970, was the Beach Boys as fully collaborative, everyone—long by this point, Bruce Johnston was enshrined as the sixth member of the group—contributing and Carl, Dennis, Love, Jardine and Johnston all clearly soaking up the lessons of Brian; Dennis most of all. Surf’s Up was the counterpoint, as murky as Sunflower was bright. These, with Carl and the Passions – "So Tough" and Holland, both with Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar as Johnston temporarily exited, form the conclusion of the second, more overtly artistic period of the group. Both were given equal statue at the 50th anniversary tour, along with triumphs that followed: ‘It’s OK,’ ‘Getcha Back,’ ‘Kokomo’ and two selections from what turned out to be their final album, That’s Why God Made the Radio.

During the opening hour of the show in Toronto, there was a mix of the engaged and the distracted; in the latter case, primarily the hipsters there for their Pet Sounds hit. After the intermission and the need for Pet Sounds satiated, the division between the crowd melted away. In the decay of ‘All Summer Long,’ Jardine counted off ‘Help Me Rhonda’ and everyone joined in on the chorus, all of us on their feet and many jumping up and down or dancing. The elation continued: ‘Rock and Roll Music’ into ‘Do You Wanna Dance?’ into ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’—first and last saluting one of Wilson’s heroes, Chuck Berry.

And then there came the encore and ‘Kokomo,’ and the greatest sight of them all. Brian Wilson strapping on a Fender bass for ‘Barbara Ann’ and the night’s rocking benediction, ‘Fun, Fun, Fun.’ He may not have been actually playing or even comfortable away from the security of the piano, but for a moment, it was as if we were all transported back in time. Back to the halcyon days of surf and sand, ready to catch that wave and sit on top of the world. For a moment, everything was possible. That some of us may still believe that to be so is, at least in part, because of Brian Wilson.